This is a crazy stat to get your head around if your business is service-oriented and doesn’t have a solid strategy for how you should be handling Twitter. It’s been well known for years in the US that the quickest way to get customer service attention is to kick up a storm on Twitter. I may have kicked up a storm or two myself over the years – particularly when it comes to a few airlines that I may or may not fly frequently. I know the struggle big brands go through firsthand when trying to handle a massive number of incoming requests having worked as a Community Manager and helped many brands install software after they’ve been burned by a crisis. It’s about time Twitter rolled out some new features for the poor, unfortunate souls who have not gotten their customer service strategies on lock down. This week, they’ve announced that they’re rolling out a few new tools that will help businesses to keep sensitive conversations private and will help those who manage large customer service teams to evaluate their employees’ performance.There have been a lot of tools on the market for the last few years to help brands manage their customer service woes that bubble up on Twitter, so these features may not be all that useful for those that already have strategies in place and are using enterprise-level tools to handle their customer service workflows until they are available in those tools. Many of the brands I’ve worked with want to get customer service interactions out of the public eye as quickly as possible – particularly if a customer is angry.

Move to Direct Messages More Quickly

One of the new features aims to make transitioning to Direct Message a lot quicker than it has been in the past. Up until this feature was rolled out, typically the only way for a brand to drive a user to send a Direct Message was to ask them to send the brand a DM directly. This new feature allows the brand to embed a Call to Action link in their tweet that turns blue and prompts the customer to click the link to transition to DM – a much faster flow. Here are some screenshot examples from Twitter’s blog post:

Customer Can Privately Share Feedback On Their Interactions with the Brand

Many customer care teams are run by managers who need to have a good understanding of whether or not customers have left an interaction fully satisfied with the service they’ve received. The second feature that Twitter has announced is called “Customer Feedback,” and it allows customers to provide their opinions of the service they’ve received in a structured format that is measureable. It uses Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction, two common, industry-standard formats. Here are some screenshots of this new feature: